Now, I may mention Marvel Studios as a comparison point at various points in this post, that does not mean I see the two as competitors, frankly, they're not as that would imply competition, which, on an artistic level is simply not the case. Though there is one comparison I can make that accurately sums up my feelings towards both at present.
Marvel Studios have made a habit of taking properties that people are less familiar with and making them into megahits (this was originally made necessary by the fact that they had sold off the rights to Spider-Man, and the X-Men among others simply to avoid bankruptcy.) , it seems hard to imagine in 2016, but there was a time Iron Man wasn't really a big deal. they then repeat this process with Thor (a pretty "out there" concept at the time) Captain America (who was widely considered "too old fashioned" to work) and more recently, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Ant-Man These efforts were often preceded by fans asking "how are they gonna make that work?" and every time, they delivered. (with varying degrees of consistency depending on how you feel about the Iron Man sequels.)
Warner Brothers and the DC comics movies, on the other hand, have, in my opinion, almost the mirror opposite scenario. Theirs is the habit of taking the most surefire megahits possible, and fucking them up without fail, the Wonder Woman trailer looks amazing, and the biggest question on my mind is, "how are they gonna fuck this one up?"
Now, I'm not one of the haters, I actually didn't mind Man of Steel. it wasn't perfect, but there was stuff in there that really worked, sure the colouring was drab as hell, and Supes himself seemed to be allergic to smiles, or any positive emotion really. But hey, I don't believe anyone who says they didn't think the city-fight at the end was entertaining. But that having been said, the film up until then was, as would become a habit, dull, grim and insufferably self-serious.
This sort of makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of an accountant who doesn't understand how entertainment works, The Dark Knight was a megahit that made enough money to sink a small island nation, so let's just try to ape the aesthetic and tone of that film to the exclusion of all else, (while completely ignoring everything that actually made the film great) Do not pretend that these people care if the film is good or not, they clearly don't or more of them would be. Warner Brothers are much more nakedly money-minded than Marvel Studios (and being more concerned with profits over artistry than a Disney subsidiary is certainly no small accomplishment.)
This might go a long way towards explaining the WB's decision to stick by Zack Snyder as a director for so long, Mr. Snyder is nothing if not a point of heavy debate among fans., His work, after all, is often some of the most polarising in the history of superhero movies, Examples of this include Watchmen which has fans divided over it's treatment of the source material, and more recently Man of Steel which sits at 55% on Rotten Tomatoes, now I know that's not an accurate measure of quality, (nothing is by the way since entertainment is subjective and therefore objectivity in appraisal is impossible) but it does paint a picture that Snyder's work is very much a consistent point of contention. I am of course, aware that Snyder himself did not direct Suicide Squad, but he did set the overall tone of the DCEU with a consistent feel in both Man of Steel and Batman v Superman a tone of which, in true Snyder fashion, people furiously debate the merits and faults without end.
The result of having such a divided audience, of course, is prolonged debate, with audiences split so often down the middle, people talk about these works for long periods of time, with the internet essentially being an entity from which nothing really goes away in the true sense, this affords such polarising work a more-or-less permanent place in the collective consciousness of the superhero film fandom. The debate is publicity, and no publicity is bad publicity, I mean unless you care about trivial things like the actual quality of a film and stuff like that. Batman v. Superman scored incredibly low with critics (and Suicide Squad even lower,) but both have many defenders, and both were huge box office successes. I know that the first movie to ever feature Batman and Superman together was always going to rake it in no matter how good or bad the actual film was, But the same cannot be said of Suicide Squad, or can it?
it's a commonly held opinion among DC fans, or sometimes just fans of comics or superhero media in general, that Batman has the best rogues gallery, but let's face it when people say Batman has the best villains, they're thinking of one character in particular, The Joker. Mr. J was notably featured in the trailers for Suicide Squad, he wasn't particularly prominent, but that didn't alter the fact that he was always the point of conversation. No matter how you feel about the casting of Jared Leto, The Joker will always inspire hype and passionate debate, the buzz around this film would've been insane even if the trailers didn't look good.Which in fairness they did, whatever else you think of Suicide Squad the marketing was top notch, so what happened?
The film itself is a curious thing, without wishing to spoil, it doesn't really hold up to logical scrutiny, the situation the team was assembled to resolve was given rise to by the team being assembled in the first place for one thing, it has a common problem with Batman v Superman in that the storytelling feels rushed, the obvious reason for this is that there were far too many characters to introduce and develop. Add to that the fact that many scenes (including an apparent majority of those to feature the Joker) were cut from the film to shorten the run-time, This makes for an incredibly rushed narrative that just feels incomplete, Plot threads appear and then disappear without conclusion, or some piece of development we never saw gets a payoff we were never set-up for, this, if talk is to be believed. is an unfortunate example of a studio interfering with a director's vision, historically, not a good sign.
Actually, I'm going to take the opportunity of talking about rushed narratives to raise one particular point here.
IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW MUCH BETTER THE ULTIMATE EDITION IS
I want to make this very clear, I am well aware that studio interference almost certainly will have played a part in these films not being all that they could, I am also well aware that as an example the "ultimate edition" of Batman v Superman is a much more complete, and better-paced story, but see, here's the thing; I don't care. If you gave me a week, I would struggle to explain everything that is wrong with this, so here are my biggest gripes with this way of thinking. firstly, a golden rule of entertainment I've internalised as a Performing Arts student is, if the audience doesn't see it, it didn't happen, incidentally you could apply this principal to a lot of the character beats in Suicide Squad, it's also the reason why the "Martha" moment in Batman v Superman will never, ever not be stupid no matter how many captioned pictures people make explaining it, even if their mental gymnastics are accurate, that reasoning wasn't demonstrated in the film and therefore, doesn't exist.in the narrative.
this is not even taking into an account that accepting the ultimate edition as the only "true" version of the story as many do, by definition makes the theatrical version an incomplete product. This means that an audience in a theatre paid full ticket prices for a product that was incomplete, Besides which, special editions of things are supposed to compliment the original release, not fix them. Is the original non-ultimate edition still available for purchase? If so then that is the true version, as this is the one the company threw all that marketing behind, if not, then people who went to cinemas were not only sold an incomplete product disguised as a full one but were misled about the quality of the final product.
If you didn't like the theatrical version, why would you buy the longer one? The eventual ultimate edition of Suicide Squad could be the best comic adaptation ever put to screen, but the theatrical version the world was sold and that the company continue to sell and make money from was rushed, choppy and poorly written, so Suicide Squad is just that, regardless of what the ultimate edition is like.
Right, with that little rant over. let's get onto the more artistic side of things, as I've dwelt on the business stuff for quite a while. See, my main problem with this version of the DC Universe, is that it clearly doesn't want me to be a part of the fandom, There is a very specific niche that this film appeals to, and to its credit, I can easily recall a time in my own life that I would have loved these films and this iteration of these characters. The thing is, that was also the time in my life I thought Shadow the Hedgehog was a good idea for a character.
The unrelentingly grim tone of these films and the complete lack of a willingness to god forbid either earn it or have any sense of irony about it, strikes me as a twelve-year-olds impression of maturity, "everything's dark and serious so it can't be for kids SEE? SUPERHEROES AREN'T JUST FOR KIDS TAKE ME SERIOUSLY!" is what I imagine any given tween saying to a dismissive person while watching these films. Trapped in a permanently adolescent sense of self-serious justification.
I was like this too as a tween/early teenager, I used to openly watch risque anime in front of people to prove it wasn't childish,("See? They swear and there's blood and nudity and everything!") even though in hindsight that attitude was pretty damn childish. I bring this up because it is here that I believe lies the problem at the core of Zack Snyder's DC Universe, As an entity this franchise is so preoccupied with being taken seriously that it forgets to be any fun, now this is not automatically a deal breaker, but you need to earn that kind of seriousness, if you want to be completely serious, then you have to convince the audience to take you equally seriously, and I just can't.
I believe that in order to get this right, you have to acknowledge that at their core, these characters and this universe was originally conceived for children, that is nothing to be ashamed of, I believe Zack Snyder when he says he's a comic book fan, but I don't believe he quite understands what that means. To be an adult comic book fan means to admit that you're that kid who never stopped wanting to believe in the hero ideal, or could never grow out of the catharsis of cartoonish villainy, Taking these characters and putting them into a dark, pseudo-realistic world and making everything unbearably grim and very decisively not for the kids they originally inspired has only ever really worked once. The Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy is a different animal, dark and gritty worked for Batman because Batman was already dark and gritty. Also, at the core of it, Batman is, and always has been, fundamentally about law and the morality thereof, and the potential for good and bad in humans represented by his friends and enemies. These are complex themes but they can be made easily digestible for children if need be,
Now, I'm going to swing the other way here for a second, of course, you don't need to make it child-friendly to have these films be good, there are adult-oriented DC Comics and there can be adult-oriented movies too, but the thing there is, if you're going to mature up these characters, the story has to be sophisticated enough to warrant it, and it is now we come to the biggest hurdle in this endeavour.
The biggest problem with the DC Comics movies is that so far, they have been largely boring, and nowhere near clever enough to make up for it, I'm gonna come right out and say it, Zack Snyder's DC Universe is dumb. the presence of backlash over the destruction in Man of Steel was just the biggest clue in that film. But sure let's focus on that for a bit, why was that destruction there? The answer is obvious, it was there because it looked cool, and made for more dramatic stakes there was no other reason,
Now, I don't have a problem with a movie being dumb, but if it is, then the director shouldn't pretend it isn't. The entire DCEU just smacks of that one person at every party, you know the one, that is clearly one of the stupidest things in human existence, but thinks they can debate with you on an intellectual level because they read a few articles on Wikipedia, Zack Snyder's DC movies routinely pretend they have some, mature resonance, but then proceed to piss all over that very idea with their ham-fisted stupidity and clumsy metaphors when they're not trying to cram six films of material into two hours.
I drew comparisons earlier to the early teen trying his damnedest to look all mature and, for lack of a better term "deep" (actually can we stop using that word? I mean, unless it's describing a body of water, it sounds insufferably pretentious even if the adjective is warranted) but the key word there is "look". Early on in the post, I made mention of aping the tone and aesthetic of The Dark Knight while ignoring what actually made the film great. To elaborate on that, the appeal of The Dark Knight had much more to it than grit, darkness, and realism. first of all, a minor point to make, it was not the first film in the series, there was already a lot of groundwork in place for Bruce Wayne, Rachel Dawes, Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, these characters and their relationships to one another were already established and their personalities and relationships realised.
Secondly, a more major point,as I've mentioned, Batman was the best choice, and really the only DC hero that this gritty realism actually compliments, give this treatment to anyone else and it seems like you're trying to apologize for the source material, if you don't believe that the source material is good, then the movie you make from it won't be. I'm not saying changes don't need to be made now and then, comics and film are vastly different media, of course, there will be some things that just don't translate well. However, your source material is what it is, if you're not comfortable with it, you shouldn't be adapting it, simple as that. I know that an unfaithful adaptation isn't always bad, on rare occasions it's even an improvement (has anyone actually read The Shining?) but at the very least the core concept has to remain intact, and at their core superhero comics as a narrative are often incredibly cheesy, this is not a thing you can really get around, so embrace it, who doesn't love cheese? I'm getting off-track but the point I'm trying to make is that for all its realism the Nolan Batman trilogy never forgot what it was, and it certainly wasn't too preoccupied with being taken seriously, it didn't need to be because...
Thirdly it was pretty well written, well The Dark Knight was anyway, so many resonated with this film for so many reasons that you can't just pin it on an aesthetic and tone as WB seem so fond of doing, The late Heath Ledger's iteration of The Joker was unlike any version before him, and honestly unlike any villain in cinema. Portraying not a gleeful sadistic clown ala Jack Nicholson, but a walking mass of evident psychological damage only out to laugh at the civilised world and its absurdities and prove that everyone's as bad as he is when the right buttons are pushed. and yes, he definitely stole the show, he also deserved that Oscar (which makes it sad that the Academy would never have given it to him living) but even he couldn't have carried this film himself, The film is incredibly quotable, with a good script and a great cast, and also the right amount of content for it's running-time.
My point is, you can't copy the success of a film by aping the look and feel of it.Another way the DCEU tried to piggyback off the success of the Nolan trilogy is with Jessie Eisenberg's version of Lex Luthor, who is essentially store-brand Ledger-Joker without the humour or any kind of reason for this characterization (except to try and re-capture the appeal held by the original template).
There are a few reasons Heath Ledger's Joker worked so well, and Jessie Eisenberg's Lex Luthor just falls flat, one of which is of course that Ledger's Joker has already happened and the appeal of whom will therefore never be replicated, and even if it could be, Eisenberg's Luthor is haphazardly written.
The version of The Joker played by Heath Ledger worked so well in part because it was The Joker, His anarchic philosophies and quirks were believable for a part of this nature, so, of course, shoving similar quirks and mannerisms into a CEO character was obviously never going to work, it doesn't come across as believable that a functioning member of society, much less a successful businessman, would act like that. Even if it could, Ledger's dialogue was well-written, witty and uniquely "Joker" whereas Eisenberg's dialogue is what Alex from Whatculture.com described as "what a twelve-year-old thinks philosophy is" which I agree with whole-heartedly as I find it a pretty apt description of the whole enterprise. The DCEU is stuck as an adolescent's idea of mature and devoid of any sense of irony that might have made it fun in a cathartic sort of way.
The bottom line of the problem is that Zack Snyder makes dumb movies, and then he tries to pass them off as smart ones, you can blame studio interference for rushed narratives all you want but this particular flaw is at the very core of the project. Writing this has made me a little sad because I really want these films to be good, I want to be able to enjoy these without qualifying it, but they're just not good.
Ah well, the Justice League trailer looks good, and the Wonder Woman trailer looks amazing, I guess we're just gonna have to hope for the best with the next few, but if not, hey, there's always Marvel.
this is not even taking into an account that accepting the ultimate edition as the only "true" version of the story as many do, by definition makes the theatrical version an incomplete product. This means that an audience in a theatre paid full ticket prices for a product that was incomplete, Besides which, special editions of things are supposed to compliment the original release, not fix them. Is the original non-ultimate edition still available for purchase? If so then that is the true version, as this is the one the company threw all that marketing behind, if not, then people who went to cinemas were not only sold an incomplete product disguised as a full one but were misled about the quality of the final product.
If you didn't like the theatrical version, why would you buy the longer one? The eventual ultimate edition of Suicide Squad could be the best comic adaptation ever put to screen, but the theatrical version the world was sold and that the company continue to sell and make money from was rushed, choppy and poorly written, so Suicide Squad is just that, regardless of what the ultimate edition is like.
Right, with that little rant over. let's get onto the more artistic side of things, as I've dwelt on the business stuff for quite a while. See, my main problem with this version of the DC Universe, is that it clearly doesn't want me to be a part of the fandom, There is a very specific niche that this film appeals to, and to its credit, I can easily recall a time in my own life that I would have loved these films and this iteration of these characters. The thing is, that was also the time in my life I thought Shadow the Hedgehog was a good idea for a character.
The unrelentingly grim tone of these films and the complete lack of a willingness to god forbid either earn it or have any sense of irony about it, strikes me as a twelve-year-olds impression of maturity, "everything's dark and serious so it can't be for kids SEE? SUPERHEROES AREN'T JUST FOR KIDS TAKE ME SERIOUSLY!" is what I imagine any given tween saying to a dismissive person while watching these films. Trapped in a permanently adolescent sense of self-serious justification.
I was like this too as a tween/early teenager, I used to openly watch risque anime in front of people to prove it wasn't childish,("See? They swear and there's blood and nudity and everything!") even though in hindsight that attitude was pretty damn childish. I bring this up because it is here that I believe lies the problem at the core of Zack Snyder's DC Universe, As an entity this franchise is so preoccupied with being taken seriously that it forgets to be any fun, now this is not automatically a deal breaker, but you need to earn that kind of seriousness, if you want to be completely serious, then you have to convince the audience to take you equally seriously, and I just can't.
I believe that in order to get this right, you have to acknowledge that at their core, these characters and this universe was originally conceived for children, that is nothing to be ashamed of, I believe Zack Snyder when he says he's a comic book fan, but I don't believe he quite understands what that means. To be an adult comic book fan means to admit that you're that kid who never stopped wanting to believe in the hero ideal, or could never grow out of the catharsis of cartoonish villainy, Taking these characters and putting them into a dark, pseudo-realistic world and making everything unbearably grim and very decisively not for the kids they originally inspired has only ever really worked once. The Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy is a different animal, dark and gritty worked for Batman because Batman was already dark and gritty. Also, at the core of it, Batman is, and always has been, fundamentally about law and the morality thereof, and the potential for good and bad in humans represented by his friends and enemies. These are complex themes but they can be made easily digestible for children if need be,
Now, I'm going to swing the other way here for a second, of course, you don't need to make it child-friendly to have these films be good, there are adult-oriented DC Comics and there can be adult-oriented movies too, but the thing there is, if you're going to mature up these characters, the story has to be sophisticated enough to warrant it, and it is now we come to the biggest hurdle in this endeavour.
The biggest problem with the DC Comics movies is that so far, they have been largely boring, and nowhere near clever enough to make up for it, I'm gonna come right out and say it, Zack Snyder's DC Universe is dumb. the presence of backlash over the destruction in Man of Steel was just the biggest clue in that film. But sure let's focus on that for a bit, why was that destruction there? The answer is obvious, it was there because it looked cool, and made for more dramatic stakes there was no other reason,
Now, I don't have a problem with a movie being dumb, but if it is, then the director shouldn't pretend it isn't. The entire DCEU just smacks of that one person at every party, you know the one, that is clearly one of the stupidest things in human existence, but thinks they can debate with you on an intellectual level because they read a few articles on Wikipedia, Zack Snyder's DC movies routinely pretend they have some, mature resonance, but then proceed to piss all over that very idea with their ham-fisted stupidity and clumsy metaphors when they're not trying to cram six films of material into two hours.
I drew comparisons earlier to the early teen trying his damnedest to look all mature and, for lack of a better term "deep" (actually can we stop using that word? I mean, unless it's describing a body of water, it sounds insufferably pretentious even if the adjective is warranted) but the key word there is "look". Early on in the post, I made mention of aping the tone and aesthetic of The Dark Knight while ignoring what actually made the film great. To elaborate on that, the appeal of The Dark Knight had much more to it than grit, darkness, and realism. first of all, a minor point to make, it was not the first film in the series, there was already a lot of groundwork in place for Bruce Wayne, Rachel Dawes, Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, these characters and their relationships to one another were already established and their personalities and relationships realised.
Secondly, a more major point,as I've mentioned, Batman was the best choice, and really the only DC hero that this gritty realism actually compliments, give this treatment to anyone else and it seems like you're trying to apologize for the source material, if you don't believe that the source material is good, then the movie you make from it won't be. I'm not saying changes don't need to be made now and then, comics and film are vastly different media, of course, there will be some things that just don't translate well. However, your source material is what it is, if you're not comfortable with it, you shouldn't be adapting it, simple as that. I know that an unfaithful adaptation isn't always bad, on rare occasions it's even an improvement (has anyone actually read The Shining?) but at the very least the core concept has to remain intact, and at their core superhero comics as a narrative are often incredibly cheesy, this is not a thing you can really get around, so embrace it, who doesn't love cheese? I'm getting off-track but the point I'm trying to make is that for all its realism the Nolan Batman trilogy never forgot what it was, and it certainly wasn't too preoccupied with being taken seriously, it didn't need to be because...
Thirdly it was pretty well written, well The Dark Knight was anyway, so many resonated with this film for so many reasons that you can't just pin it on an aesthetic and tone as WB seem so fond of doing, The late Heath Ledger's iteration of The Joker was unlike any version before him, and honestly unlike any villain in cinema. Portraying not a gleeful sadistic clown ala Jack Nicholson, but a walking mass of evident psychological damage only out to laugh at the civilised world and its absurdities and prove that everyone's as bad as he is when the right buttons are pushed. and yes, he definitely stole the show, he also deserved that Oscar (which makes it sad that the Academy would never have given it to him living) but even he couldn't have carried this film himself, The film is incredibly quotable, with a good script and a great cast, and also the right amount of content for it's running-time.
My point is, you can't copy the success of a film by aping the look and feel of it.Another way the DCEU tried to piggyback off the success of the Nolan trilogy is with Jessie Eisenberg's version of Lex Luthor, who is essentially store-brand Ledger-Joker without the humour or any kind of reason for this characterization (except to try and re-capture the appeal held by the original template).
There are a few reasons Heath Ledger's Joker worked so well, and Jessie Eisenberg's Lex Luthor just falls flat, one of which is of course that Ledger's Joker has already happened and the appeal of whom will therefore never be replicated, and even if it could be, Eisenberg's Luthor is haphazardly written.
The version of The Joker played by Heath Ledger worked so well in part because it was The Joker, His anarchic philosophies and quirks were believable for a part of this nature, so, of course, shoving similar quirks and mannerisms into a CEO character was obviously never going to work, it doesn't come across as believable that a functioning member of society, much less a successful businessman, would act like that. Even if it could, Ledger's dialogue was well-written, witty and uniquely "Joker" whereas Eisenberg's dialogue is what Alex from Whatculture.com described as "what a twelve-year-old thinks philosophy is" which I agree with whole-heartedly as I find it a pretty apt description of the whole enterprise. The DCEU is stuck as an adolescent's idea of mature and devoid of any sense of irony that might have made it fun in a cathartic sort of way.
The bottom line of the problem is that Zack Snyder makes dumb movies, and then he tries to pass them off as smart ones, you can blame studio interference for rushed narratives all you want but this particular flaw is at the very core of the project. Writing this has made me a little sad because I really want these films to be good, I want to be able to enjoy these without qualifying it, but they're just not good.
Ah well, the Justice League trailer looks good, and the Wonder Woman trailer looks amazing, I guess we're just gonna have to hope for the best with the next few, but if not, hey, there's always Marvel.
